Welcome to Play Smart, a regular GOLF.com game-improvement column that will help you become a smarter, better golfer.
Bunker shots can be tricky under the best of conditions — and that’s even true for the best players in the world. On the PGA Tour last season, the leader in sand save percentage (Carl Yuan) got up-and-down from the bunker just 69 percent of the time, and the Tour average was just below 55 percent. If the best players in the world are saving par at such a sparse clip, you can only imagine how much difficulty weekend warriors have.
Throw a wonky lie into the mix and you have a recipe for disaster. You can forget about hoping to save par. Just getting out of the bunker should be considered a win.
When it comes to difficult lies in the sand, nothing is more difficult than a ball that is plugged. But while the fried-egg lie can be daunting, there are strategies you can employ to make things a bit easier.
Instructor Kelan McDonagh explains one such technique in the video below.
Typically when you find yourself with a fried-egg lie, you’re instructed to hood the clubface and strike down behind the ball as hard as you can. However, McDonagh prescribes a different technique — and it involves trying to strike the ball with the hosel.
McDonagh says that for your setup, you should take your normal stance and open the clubface like you would for a normal bunker shot. But instead of trying to hit behind the ball a couple inches, he says you should try to strike the sand just behind the ball with the bottom of the hosel.
“A way that I learned as a kid and that’s stuck with me ever since is what’s called the ‘hammer-and-nail technique,'” McDonagh says. “We try to hit the sand where the hosel meets the clubhead.”
When you set up, hover the bottom of the hosel directly over the ball. Then, when you make your swing, imagine hammering a nail into the sand directly behind the ball.
“It should make the ball pop straight up,” McDonagh says.
You may want to avoid the hosel at all costs at other times on the course, but when you find yourself with a fried egg, it’s not a bad strategy.
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